My 3-year-old daughter attends day care next to the Moab Police Department’s parking lot, by the library. I often ride my bike through this parking lot to bring her to school in the morning, and on most days, I ride past multiple officers standing around, idling their vehicles, joking and having conversations, etc.
This week, as my daughter and I rode by, two officers were standing next to their vehicle playing with a large military-grade assault rifle fixed with a sound suppressor. They were handling the weapon like a toy: laughing and joking while they inserted, dropped, and re-inserted the clip multiple times, tossing the rifle around carelessly like a pair of cocky teenage boys. The officers were doing this in full view of other children, as the parking lot is adjacent to the school playground and in full view of it. With its large silencer, the weapon was longer than my 3-year-old is tall.
These two grown adults—men supposedly so responsible that they are authorized to use violent and lethal force to control people they determine are behaving irresponsibly—thought it was a fine use of their tax-payer-funded time to play around with a deadly weapon in front of small children. It was terrifying and enraging.
Why the police in Moab, Utah—one of the safest places on the planet—would need military grade assault weapons with sound suppressors is beyond me, but at the very least they should have the maturity and self-awareness not to play with firearms in front of children. It’s scary, it’s embarrassingly irresponsible, and it teaches kids that guns are toys. This, I suppose, is why MPD needs an ever-increasing, multi-million dollar share of the tax revenue: to pay officers $70,000-$100,000 a year to stand around in parking lots playing with machine guns that they will never use in real life, except perhaps to kill people unnecessarily, as police tend to do.
I wrote the City Council about what my daughter and I saw, and I look forward to hearing what the city plans to do to address this unprofessional behavior on the part of officials supposedly tasked with protecting our public safety. I am writing this editorial so that parents in the community know (if they don’t already) that they should keep their kids away from the Moab Police Department, since it is clearly not a safe or welcoming place for children.
Max Granger
Moab
